


back to the hedgerows (where bodies are mounted)

by okayantigone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Horcruxes, King's Cross, Limbo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26500750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone
Summary: “you think you’re a better person than me,” tom riddle says. “and i’m not talking about now."“then what are you talking about, my boy?”“not your boy,” tom says sharply. “i’m talking about before,” he says. “the me from before. before everything. when we first met. was it easy to decide that you are so much better than a child, because your mother loved you when she gave birth for you, and you had a father to welcome you both to a nice warm house from the hospital?”-voldemort dies. it's not the first time.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Voldemort
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	back to the hedgerows (where bodies are mounted)

**Author's Note:**

> "people improve when they are given external love and support. how can we hold it against them when they don't," is a quote from the good place that just BOWLED ME TF OVER. 
> 
> here's my half-coherent rambles about how dumbledore's job was to /hurture/ tom and /CARE/ about him.

the white walls of king’s cross gleam with their perfect purity, the bricks inlaid like the mother-of-pearl trincket dishes where his mother used to put her rings after a long day, engagement, wedding, suffer.

oh, but mrs. dumbledore had carried her tragedy so well.

he sits down on the bench under a sign that gleams with the promise of a peaceful journey, and joyous end.

every train has its passengers, but his train has not arrived yet, so he waits. he hopes his travel companions will be marry. he hopes they will make nice. in his mind’s eye, he sees the compartments of the hogwarts express like they once were, bright and warm, and full of laughter. he would like a pumpkin pastry from the trolley, rather.

when he hears the footsteps, at first he doesn’t look towards them. the steps continue anyway. somehow, without needing to look just yet, he can tell that a man is walking towards him, wearing fine polished shoes with thick heels which click against the white marble.

when he finally does look, he is only a little bit surprised. tom looks like he had in his youth, his dark hair charmingly disheveled, wearing a nice muggle suit, but with a traveling cloak draped over it, his pale elegant hands adorned with the kind of rings he never could have afforded in life, rowena ravenclaw’s tiara gleaming in his curls.

his eyes are just turning red, and his mouth is ripe, but not rotten into cruelty.

he walks with the confidence in his step that he had always had, an elegance and languidity to him that albus now knows to be the marking of a predator. he reaches the child, and he picks it up easily in his arms, no sign of revulsion on his handsome arrogant face.

“children cry when they want to be picked up,” he says evenly. he rocks the malformed thing almost habitually. “of course, when an orphanage is overrun with children, there’s no one to pick them up. do you know what they call the orphanage rock?”

finally, he slants his gaxe towards albus.

“hello, tom,” albus says evenly.

“don’t call me that,” says tom reflexively, annoyance flitting over his features. then, “of all the people – i didn’t think it would be you.”

“who did you think it would be?”

“honestly, i didn’t think we’d get here at all.”

“you’ve always been an arrogant boy,” albus says mildly.

“you’ve always been a blind and foolish old man. we can stand here and recite each other’s shortcomings in our faces until kingdom come. has – has it come by the way?”

“has what?”

“the train.”

“i don’t think you and i will be boarding the same train, my boy,” albus says. he is quite sorry about that, of course. but tom had done too much in his life, and none of it had been good.

“no, i suppose you wouldn’t think that,” tom says. “you think you’re a better person than me.”

“you killed a lot of people, tom. a lot of good people. you did so much damage.”

tom flinches again, at the sound of his own name, shakes his head angrily. “no,” he says, “no.”

he grips the shard of his soul tighter to his chest with one arm, so he can raise the other and wave it in the air dismissively. somewhere in the depth of his mind, a knowledge comes in his hind brain. _support the head._

“i’m not talking about now. i know what i did. i don’t regret it. i knew what i was doing the entire time, i _enjoyed_ it.” he meets dumbledore’s gaze, challenges him to say something. why should he apologize now? albus dumbledore is not his judge, or jury.

“then what are you talking about, my boy?”

“not your boy,” tom says sharply. _not anyone’s._ he closes his eyes. he breathes in deeply. he can smell the smoke thick in the london smog. it smells like a home he never had, a place he can never return to.

“i’m talking about before,” he says. “the me from before. before everything. when we first met.”

“you were a remarkable young boy,” dumbledore says fondly.

“no, i wasn’t. i was a monster. you thought so. and you thought you were better than me.”

the him from before – he has trouble remembering, sometimes, how tall dumbledore had seemed to him then. a powerful, all-knowing adult. and the first thing he’d done was make fire.

“it was so easy,” tom says quietly, “for you to think that i was a monster, because why? i had a mean look? i stole a couple of trinckets? so a few kids got hurt, so what? kids get scrapes all the time, and what i gave them wasn’t much different – not then, anyway.”

he makes a few soothing noises at the child in his arms, somewhere between toddler and baby, already well-maimed, ruined for life, and for death. if he hadn’t picked it up, it would have laid there. if the doors hadn’t opened for merope gaunt that winter, it would have been him too, covered in blood and placenta, his lungs crystalizing slowly with ice, as the snow fell around them, like so much pearl dust. he wouldn’t even have had a name.

“was it easy to decide that you are so much better than a child, because your mother loved you when she gave birth for you, and you had a father to welcome you both to a nice warm house from the hospital?”

“i never thought i was better than you, tom,” albus says gently, in that patronizing tone that tom knows well.

it’s the voice that told him, each summer, to return to a city on fire, where the lights went out of his eyes and the bombs rattled the heart in his smoke-filled chest.

“well,” he concedes. “maybe not. but you thought i wasn’t –“ he struggles for the word. worthy is not right. dumbledore had seen his worth alright. seen it, feared it… begrudged it, even. “good,” he says finally. “you thought i wasn’t good.”

he hadn’t been. well. he hadn’t been a particularly good child, in any case. but he had been a good student – diligent, and polite, and helpful to his juniors. he’d been a good sport in quidditch, and a good sport when he got taunts for his nobody-name. he’d been good at pretending that he didn’t wake up every night, to blow out all the candles in the dorm, just in case. he’d been good at potions, and good at charms, and good at defense, and also at the dark arts. he’d been a good assistant to old mr. borgin. he’d have made a good teacher.

he’d been good at all the things he could have learned from a book.

“you like to go on and on about love,” he says, tried the word carefully on his tongue. he isn’t sure if he has ever felt. probably, he has not. he knows that he has seen it. severus had loved lily potter enough to die for her. lily potter had loved her son enough to die for him. and so on, and so on. perhaps what love meant then, was just simply sacrifice, and maybe if someone had explained it to him back then, that he could have understood.

love meant dying and being dead, breaking apart at the feet of someone infinitiely better than you. no – not better, but maybe… someone less tainted. someone with more potential, with more unsquandered white spaces where marks could be left not just from the ugly things in the world.

it’s not that he doesn’t know love. it’s that there are no blank spaces in him left. the London fog that had choked out his youth had seeped into everything, and by the time he’d emerged into clear skies, he’d been already a man, and the world had no place for someone who didn’t know the kinds of things he had never been able to learn from a book.

“people are not,” he bounces the child in his arms, as he pauses, finds his words. “people are not static,” he says finally. “a child sorted into gryffindor at eleven can become a coward who betrays his friends in his twenties, and spend the rest of his life hiding from the consequences in the guise of a rat. is that brave?”

dumbledore is studying him carefully, his cold humorless eyes piercing behind the rims of his glasses.

“perhaps,” he says slowly, “we do sort too soon.”

“people change,” tom continues, ignoring him. “they are _capable_ of it. they can get worse – “ he nods down at himself, still small, underfed and pathetic. “but they can also get better. i know you’ve seen it too.”

it’s a strange turn of events, for him to be the one giving a lecture to dumbledore. the truth is, he enjoys it just a little bit. he has died, lived, died again. he has been a man, and he has been something not entirely human, and he has been less, and more than a man, and in nagini’s mind, even a woman, briefly, and a snake. he has become and unbecome, long before he came here.

“people get better, and improve,” he repeats, “when they are shown external love and support,” he shakes his head, and meets dumbledore’s eyes. “how could you hold it against us, when we don’t?”

he had been a _good_ student. if there was a lesson, he would have learned it.

there had been a lesson, and he’d remembered it well.

strong, powerful men can make fire to make all your shiny trinckets burn.

he had been a _good_ student.

dumblefore could have taught him, and he could have learned.

“i failed you, tom,” dumbledore finally says, and tom grinds his jaw. _not my bloody –_

“no, no,” he waves his hand again, adjusts his grip on the child. “you didn’t fail me. forget about me. maybe i never would have gotten better. maybe my fate would always be to die at the altar of your greater good. it’s not me, personally, that you failed.”

he shakes his head. there’s no point in being angry about it. he had always hated the thought of being like common muggle father. he hated it so much, in the end he’d just become a pale, pathetic copy of his pitiful mother, shattering herself against the indifference of her betters, until it killed her. he wonders if she came here too, in a flimsy bloody nightgown, and boarded a train to a world where she is beautiful and loved.

her death had not saved him. he suspects nothing could have saved him at all. he had become what others needed saving from, the thing others could shatters against, and he’d welcomed the pieces.

dumbledore had come and set fires to his shiny trinkets, and tom had learned real fear that day. he had learned that you cannot be both feared, and loved. he had learned that you have to choose. and choose, and choose and choose. and no one had ever loved tom riddle, and he had known that then, inasmuch as children can know the things that they don’t have the words for.

and… what had dumbledore, pureblooded, talented, renowned, _loved,_ by his family, both living and dead, learned?

and what had he _failed_ to learn?

_that_ tom riddle had been a child, albeit a powerful, strange and unsettling child, and to him adults were towering and infallible, even the ones who feared him.

dumbledore had not feared him.

it is not the job of children to convince adults that they are worthy of protection.

dumbledore had not loved him either.

dumbledore’s love, selfish and shallow, and depleted, was a squandered thing.

“i don’t want you to board that train, thinking you were right,” tom riddle says. dumbledore blinks, surprise in the line of his shoulders, as he watches the perfect white train, clouds of smoke that could never exist bubbling lazily in the air, fragile and pure. “i can admit that i am wrong. can you?”

“won’t you board?” dumbledore deflects deftly.

“i think i’d like to walk,” tom riddle says. the exit signs appear like a memory from a dream. “i think i need the fresh air. we both do.”

the child is dozing against his heart. no one had protected him. there was no sacrifice in his mother’s death, just sadness and defeat. he is not the tom riddle her heart had bled for. he looks towards the exit. he does not forgive her. he does not seek forgiveness.

“where will you go?”

“i don’t know,” he says, “but i don’t think we’ll see each other again.”

“tom,” dumbledore says. he is already boarding. the fine edge of his robes trails the little precarious steps leading into the compartment. the train is waiting for him to decide if he is in, or out. “i hope you get better.”

tom shakes his head. smiles a private, bitter thing.

“i hope you do too,” he says. means it.

the train peels off the platform. he holds the child, bloody, unwanted, and ruinous, and he walks out into the sun, to raise himself into a man who can love the sun. 


End file.
